Whoa — Fred Armisen Is Going to Be the Band Leader on ‘Late Night With Seth Meyers’

As recently as a month ago, it looked like the new Late Night might downplay the musical side of things, making a stark departure from Jimmy Fallon’s era with the Roots. And suddenly it’s a Monday afternoon and Seth Meyers is tweeting that Fred Armisen is his new band leader! “Fred will curate and lead the band, and continue to run it even when he’s off shooting Portlandia,” Meyers writes. Aside from making Portlandia with Carrie Brownstein — a rocker long before she was a comedic actress — Armisen also has his own storied history of musicianship, having played drums since high school, wound up on albums by established acts, performed with the Blue Man Group, and invented characters like Portlandia’s Pet Sounds-obsessed home studio guy and the Clash-obsessed Ian Rubbish. Splitsider has a great collection of some of Armisen’s best musical moments on SNL, as well as a rundown of the rest of the band thus far: There’s Les Savy Fav’s Seth Jabour and Syd Butler, Beyoncé session drummer Kimberly Thompson, and Girls Against Boys keyboardist Eli Janney.

Also: The final pre–Seth Meyers episode of Late Nightpulled 6.6 million viewers, the show’s biggest audience under Jimmy Fallon’s reign.

Ron Howard’snext film will be Mena, “a fact-based tale about Barry Seal, a portly pilot who, in the 1980s, was a 300-pound gun runner, and drug trafficker who transported contraband for the CIA and the Medellin cartel.”

Here’s what happens when you mistake Samuel L. Jackson for Laurence Fishburne on live TV like a damned fool.
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Speaking of the Beatles: Lauryn Hill did “Something” on Letterman. [via]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j819FVqgcmI

Fox’s X Factorhas been canceled. The word from Simon Cowell: “Last year, for a number of reasons, I had to make a decision to return to the U.K. version of The X Factor in 2014. So for now, I’m back to the U.K. and I want to thank Fox for being an incredible partner and I also want to thank everybody who has supported my shows. America, I’ll see you soon!”